Mayfest 2017: Semantics and Linguistic Theory 27

Mayfest is a workshop that brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines and perspectives to discuss fundamental issues in linguistics. In 2017, Mayfest will be the 27th annual meeting of Semantics and Linguistic Theory, the premiere international conference in semantics.

Check out the official website for SALT27.

Dates

Workshop: May 11, 2017
Main conference: May 12-14, 2017

Location

University of Maryland, College Park.

Speakers

Invited Speakers for SALT
Pranav Anand
Chris Barker
Sarah Murray
Maribel Romero

Invited speakers for Workshop
Angelika Kratzer
Beth Levin
Jeffrey Lidz

Topic of Workshop

Meaning and Distribution

Sometimes a syntactic class has a conceptual correlate. For example, often nouns express object concepts, verbs express event concepts, and subclasses of them express more specific distinctions. Such correlations have served as a prompt to linguistic theory, in three different ways. They have been taken to support specific claims of semantic or syntactic analysis; to supply premises for bootstrapping in language acquisition; and to force questions about the relative contributions of linguistic and nonlinguistic factors to the character of human languages. For this workshop, we invite critical discussion in any of these areas, and scrutiny of presumed relations between them. How do relations between meaning and distribution help us understand language acquisition, variation or invariance across languages, and relations between linguistic and nonlinguistic cognition? Joining us will be three invited speakers, plus three speakers chosen from submitted abstracts, and much time for productive conversation.